Canola's flowering clock still ticks without a cold winter
Duveneck S, Ille K, Melzer S
Crispr
If you've ever wondered why some canola or mustard-family crops bolt early in a warm spring, this gene family is a big part of the answer, and tweaking it could help breeders time harvests as winters grow less predictable.
Canola plants come in two types: ones that need a cold winter before they'll flower, and 'spring' types that skip that requirement. Researchers expected a gene called FLC, the plant's main cold-sensing switch, to be mostly irrelevant in the spring type since it doesn't need cold at all. Instead, when they deleted all nine copies of this gene using CRISPR, the plants flowered much earlier, proving the gene is still quietly controlling bloom timing even without any vernalization involved.
Key Findings
CRISPR/Cas9 was used to knock out all nine BnFLC gene homologs in the spring canola cultivar Westar
Loss of BnFLC genes significantly accelerated flowering, showing the genes act independently of cold exposure
One homolog, BnFLC.A03b, was found to be permanently silenced by repressive epigenetic marks, while other floral regulators showed altered expression in leaves of the mutant
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists used gene editing to knock out nine copies of a flowering-control gene in canola, finding that even spring varieties that don't need winter chill still rely on this gene to time their bloom.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
FLC genes control flowering time to varying degrees in a Brassica napus spring cultivar.
In the crop Brassica napus (oilseed rape), distinct growth types have been established that differ mainly in their vernalization requirement for flowering. The need for vernalization in Arabidopsis...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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